Best of the East 2018: Late Night Food

If you thought Barrio was good for dinner, drink a few more margaritas and then stop in for a taco.

Barrio rules the late-night food scene with the power of choice. With five restaurant locations — the newest one opening in January in downtown Willoughby — and four food trucks on the streets, Barrio instructs diners to build their tacos from an extensive list of offerings that’s always being tweaked. There are also preconstructed tacos for the indecisive. But as the folks at Barrio watched customers build their tacos, a pattern began to emerge.

“We noted our guests were building their version of a BLT taco really frequently,” says Jake Hawley, director of operations at Barrio. “Now having the bacon shell we figured we’d do our own awesome take on BLT.” And thus, the Bomba De Tocino was born.

The Shell:The bacon shell Hawley mentions is the newly created bombshell, a masterpiece of a soft flour shell combined with a hard corn shell with queso and crumbled bacon.

What’s Inside:The bacon in the shell isn’t enough, so there’s thick-cut bacon inside, mixed with creamy Chihuahua cheese, lettuce and pico de gallo serving as the tomato component. A cilantro-lime aioli rounds out the toppings with pickled jalapenos.